This disclosure relates to a method, a system and computer program product for performing automated operations for replicating database contents to network-enabled remote systems, and in particular to limiting such replication with respect to sensitive database contents.
It is often advantageous to replicate database contents to remote storage systems, and in particular to enable database manager applications using a network database model to replicate such database contents. The remote systems may use this data for various purposes, including data warehousing, data caching, payments processing, analytics, and other processing. The same data (customer records, as one non-limiting example) may be replicated to several different remote systems. However, the individual remote systems may not need or use all of the received data.
For example, a replicated record for a customer database may include a field for the credit card number used in a customer transaction. A payment processing system may need the credit card number, but other systems focused upon analytics and data caching may not. Moreover, in order to protect customer sensitive information, it may be desirable to replicate credit card numbers or other potentially sensitive information to only those systems that require it.
Various approaches have been used to limit the replication of such sensitive data, but typically utilize custom formats to send subsets of the data to each remote system, where each format only contains the data required for that system. Such approaches may require a unique data format for each remote system targeted for data replication, and are generally inefficient and labor intensive.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a method and system to allow a common format for all remote systems, while avoiding replication of sensitive information to remote systems that do not require or use that information.